The training and mode of life of the athletes just described was obviously not suitable for all kinds of gymnastic contests. Such diet would have been very pernicious for running and jumping; wrestling and boxing and the pancration were their chief domain, and it was in these that the more celebrated athletes of antiquity, whose names have come down to us—viz., Milo, Polydamas, Glaucus, and the rest—were specially distinguished. Their rewards were of various kinds. The victors in the Olympian games were allowed to set up a statue in the Grove of Altis, at Olympia, at their own expense or that of their relations, sometimes even of the state to which the victor belonged; and at home, too, they very frequently had the same honour of a public statue assigned to them. When they returned from the games, they held a solemn entry into their own town, dressed in purple, riding on a car drawn by four white horses, accompanied by their friends and relations and a rejoicing crowd; it was even an ancient custom to pull down a piece of the city wall, in order to show that a city which could produce such citizens required no walls for its defence. Then followed a banquet in honour of the victor, in which hymns were sung in his praise. Rewards were also given in coin. At Athens, after the time of Solon, the victor in the Olympian games received 500 drachmae, the victor in one of the three other great national contests a hundred drachmae; in later times they even had the right of dining every day at the public expense in the town-hall (πρυτανεῖον), and they also enjoyed the honour of sitting on the front benches of the theatre (προεδρία). Moreover, most of the professional athletes, if they lived carefully and abstained from all departures from their customary diet and mode of life, were able to continue their contests for a good many years, sometimes thirty or more, and were thus able to pile honour on honour and reward on reward. The unlimited admiration which the mass of the people, and especially the youth, who were easily won by exhibitions of strength, gave to these combatants, who seem to us at the present day to have been but rough prize-fighters, stands in strong contrast to the judgment pronounced on them by men of real intellectual development, especially by the philosophers. They rightly complained that this one-sided development of the body was perfectly useless to the State, since the athletes were only capable in their own domain, but were quite unable to endure fatigues and undertake military service; they pointed out that the mode of life which aimed merely at increasing the bodily strength tended to dwarf the intellect, and that, therefore, the athletes were absolutely useless for political as well as for all intellectual purposes. Wise educators, therefore, disapproved of athletic training, and, indeed, the greatest warriors and statesmen of Greece seem always to have despised it.

CHAPTER IX.
MUSIC AND DANCING.

Stringed Instruments—The Lyre—The Cithara—Wind Instruments—The Flute—Trumpets, Tambourines, and other Instruments—Dancing as a Popular Amusement—The Dance in Religious Ceremonies.

We do not intend in this place to discuss the history and theory of ancient music, but only to supplement what has been said already about the musical instruction of youth, by indicating the most important branches of music which were studied in Greece and describing the instruments in use. We shall pass over vocal music entirely, since it played no great part in antiquity apart from instrumental accompaniment, and its chief purpose was for song and the drama.

The commonest instruments in ordinary use were stringed. These were well suited for solo-playing as well as for accompanying songs, and the singer could accompany himself with them, which would have been impossible in the case of wind instruments. The stringed instruments used in Greece were all played by striking or thrumming, and not by means of a bow; in fact, it is a disputed point whether the ancients, and in particular the Egyptians, were at all acquainted with the bow; in any case we do not find it in classical antiquity. Among the various kinds of stringed instruments which had either existed in Greece since the oldest times or been introduced from foreign countries, especially from the East or from Egypt, there were only two which were of special importance for educational and ordinary purposes. These were the lyre and the cithara, which were closely related to one another, and only distinguished by the effect of the sound. Of these the simpler, and probably also the older, was the lyre, which, according to a Greek legend, was an invention of Hermes, who constructed the first lyre out of a tortoise, which he used as a sounding-board, stretching cords across it. Even in later times tortoise-shells seem to have been actually used in the construction of lyres, and on works of art, especially vase pictures (compare the “Bowl of Duris,” which represents school teaching in Attica, Fig. [75]), we can plainly distinguish the markings of the tortoise on the outer side of the instrument. It must, however, have been more usual to construct the sounding-board of wood, and only adorn it externally with tortoise-shell or other decorative materials; the writers mention boxwood and ilex as the principal materials for lyres, as well as ivory, which last was probably used for decorative purposes. In the Homeric hymn to Hermes, in which the invention of the lyre by the god is described in detail, Hermes cuts little stems of reed, which he fastens into the shell in gridiron fashion and covers with ox-skin, and by this means obtains the necessary covering for the sounding-board. In later times the proceeding was probably different, since the usual material for the sounding-board was undoubtedly wood, and the covering was, no doubt, made of wood also. But the shape of the sounding-board always remained the same; the outer side was a good deal raised, while the inner side on which the strings were attached was a level surface. Into this sounding-board two arms were fixed, which are almost always represented on Greek monuments as merely curved pieces of wood fastened on the inner side of the sounding-board; but the custom which in later times, especially in the Alexandrine and Roman periods, became very common, of not merely constructing these arms in the shape of horns, but even making them of real horns of chamois or gazelles, no doubt existed even in the ancient Greek period.

At their upper ends the two arms, which might be called horns, were fastened together by a cross-piece, called the yoke, which was usually constructed of hard wood, and on to this the strings, constructed of sheep-guts, were stretched. Of these the lyre usually had seven, all of equal length, which was also the case in the cithara. These strings, as we can clearly see in the lyres of the above-mentioned bowl (Fig. [75]), passed downwards over a bridge consisting of a piece of reed fixed on the flat covering of the sounding-board, and were then fastened singly, probably to a little square board, such as we see on the lyre hanging on the wall in Fig. [75]. Probably this little board could be taken out, and thus, if a string were to break, the injury could be easily repaired. Occasionally the strings were merely tied to the yoke; but, as this primitive method would make it impossible to tune them, we must assume that there was usually some other contrivance, though neither writers nor monuments give us sufficient information about it. On the lyres in Fig. [75], and also in other pictures of stringed instruments, we perceive at the upper ends of the strings, longish rolls which in other places are shaped more like rings or discs, and are probably set at an angle to the stretched strings. An hypothesis has been set up by Von Jan, who infers, from ancient writers, after comparing similar contrivances in Nubian stringed instruments, that these rolls were constructed of thick skin or hide, taken from the backs of oxen or sheep; the strings were fastened into these adhesive covers and twisted along with them round the yoke of the lyre until they attained the right tune, and they were then fastened into their proper position by strongly pressing down these rolls of hide. Still, this rough mode of fastening which could only permit of very superficial tuning of the strings, does not appear very satisfactory; indeed, Von Jan himself calls attention to a far more artistic contrivance observed in some of the pictures which has not yet, however, been satisfactorily explained. There seems also to have been a third mode of fastening; sometimes the whole yoke was divided into as many little pulleys connected by pegs as there were strings, so that each string had, as it were, its own yoke, by the tightening of which it could be tuned without the other strings being affected. We have no further details about this construction.

On the vase painting represented in Fig. [136], which presents a number of women with musical instruments, perhaps Muses, one is leaning back comfortably in her easy-chair, and playing on the lyre, here represented with six strings; the woman standing in front of her seems about to tune the strings of her cithara. The cithara differed from the lyre chiefly in the form and structure of the sounding-board. This was constructed of wood, often artistically decorated and adorned with valuable materials, precious stones, etc., and was much larger and more arched than the sounding-board of the lyre. It usually had a straight base, and sometimes sounding holes, which was less often the case with the lyre, and its arms were far wider and squarer, and, being also hollow, seem to have helped to strengthen the sound. On some

Fig. 136.